


A Mind Wiped Clean

by Steerpike13713



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Fusion, Amnesia, Captivity, Child Death, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Past Relationship(s), Pre-Season/Series 01, Relationship Negotiation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-24 21:29:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14962527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Steerpike13713/pseuds/Steerpike13713
Summary: “It’s alright,” Cahill is saying now, almost soothingly. “It’s alright. I know you’re angry now, you don’t understand what we’re trying to do here. But you will. You’ll see. Rittenhouse needs you-”“You think I’m going to- what, work for you, after what you’ve done?” Lucy demands, her voice high and oddly shrill even to her own ears. “You really think I’m just going to-”“Yes, Lucy, you will,” Cahill says, impossibly gentle. “Because you won’t remember.”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I feel I may owe an apology to Lorena Flynn - ok, her role is mainly to get fridged, but writing her out of even that seems a bit cruel. I may consider expanding this with what happens in-series after this mess, depending on reader response.

The room is cold, and bare, and clinical. A bed, a sink, a toilet. A makeshift prison cell. Lucy can see, in the ceiling, where the place for a light fitting has been plastered over, leaving an incongruous circle of crown moulding in the whiteness of the ceiling. Lucy knows every crack in that ceiling off by heart now. She lies there on the bed staring up at it, still in her bloodstained pyjamas, and waits for the dawn.

She is still alive. When her vision had blurred and darkened on the floor of the upstairs landing, she had thought she was dying, but she had woken here, in this cell, with the wound to her side bandaged up tight. That’s probably why they covered over the light fitting, why the window is tightly barred, the plug for the sink missing and the bedclothes not the sort that could be knotted together to form a rope. Whoever did this, they want her alive. Her. And only her. She saw- she still sees the spray of blood on the white fur of Iris’ plush unicorn every time she closes her eyes. Still sees the little body, tiny in death, her dark hair matted with blood. Two bullets. In the movies, it was cleaner. You got a neat little entrance wound and a neat little exit wound. Not- The red ruin of her daughter’s head is always with her, now. Skull and brain matter and blood. So much blood. She doesn’t know what happened to Garcia. He had been asleep - he’d stirred, when she got up, but nothing more - but he was always a light sleeper. Years in the field, he’d said when she asked about it the first time. No-one slept deeply in a warzone.

It does not feel quite real. This room, the blood on her clothes, the attack on the house. It feels like- like a dream. As if she would turn a corner or step through a door and wake up, safe and whole, with Garcia snoring beside her and Iris jumping on the bed. It feels like something Lucy read, once, in a book. Like something that happened to another Lucy Flynn, a memory that should not be hers.

It had been an ordinary day, was the worst of it. Lectures and essays to grade and Iris’ first trip to the dentist. Garcia was home, would be home all month, barring emergencies. She’d woken up with him snoring into her hair, his arm lying heavy around her waist. She’d been able to get in to work early, with him there to handle the school run, spent the morning lecturing on the Cold War and arguing with Doctor Sokolov, who seemed to consider it almost a sacred duty to re-create the Cold War with the only American in the history department. She’d graded papers through lunch and spent her afternoon office hours answering student questions and preparing lecture notes. She’d made it home early due to a scheduling conflict and a few favours, eaten dinner and done more marking on the sofa with her feet in Garcia’s lap and Iris watching an old movie while they worked. It was Garcia’s turn to read to Iris that night - they were halfway through the second Harry Potter, and Iris had been pretending to be a witch all month - and so Lucy had curled up on the sofa with a glass of wine and an awful soap opera until it was time for bed. What, in all of that, was there to prepare her for waking in the middle of the night and going to check on her daughter, and finding a nightmare waiting for her on the landing?

The sun is just starting to peek through the bars of her window when there comes a knock at the door. An actual knock, as if she had a choice in the matter. Of course, she doesn’t, and so the door opens, revealing an elderly man, in what Lucy would estimate as his mid-sixties or early seventies, dressed like some child’s favourite grandfather. He smiles when he sees her, an expression every bit as warmly paternal as his sweater, and it makes Lucy’s skin crawl.

“I’m glad to see you’re alright,” he says warmly, and just like that the dam breaks.

“Alright?” Lucy demands, incredulous, her voice shaking. “ _Alright_ ? I am _the furthest thing in the world from alright!_ ”

The man holds up his hands, “I know,” he says gently. “I know. You must hate us. I understand. Won’t you sit down?”

“Sit-!” Lucy’s eyes well up with awful, furious tears and she blinks them away, not wanting to give this bastard the satisfaction of seeing her cry. “Who are you? What do you want? Why-”

Why leave her alive, when they hadn’t spared Iris, hadn’t spared Garcia. She had known his work was dangerous, had lived in fear every time he went away that this would be the time that Stiv would arrive alone at their front door, solemn-faced, carrying with him the last mementos of Garcia Flynn. She had married him in the full knowledge that he would be the first of them to die, but- But Iris, lying there on the bedroom carpet like a broken toy, the one eye the bullets had left wide and terrified.

The man reaches out as if to hold her, and Lucy flinches back, the backs of her knees hitting the bed and nearly knocking her legs out from under her.

“My name’s Benjamin Cahill,” the man says, and sits down beside her, ignoring her scramble to get away. “I-” he shakes his head. “I- You know, it’s strange now I come to say this, but- I’m your father.”

Lucy laughs wildly, a laugh that is almost a sob. “My _father_ is Henry Wallace,” she spits at him. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you just murdered my family!” Her voice cracks on the word ‘murdered’ and she bites down on another awful flood of tears. They were going to take Iris down to Split that weekend, she thinks, though she cannot remember why it’s so important. They were going to show her the ruins of Diocletian’s palace and the city where Garcia grew up. “You really think I’m going to believe anything you say after that?”

“I didn’t order their deaths, Lucy,” Cahill says earnestly - so earnestly, Lucy could almost believe him. “If I hadn’t seen your name on the order, you’d have died with them, but I did, and I made it clear that you weren’t to be harmed. Apparently one of the men we hired got a little...over-enthusiastic, but it’s not-”

“Are you _fucking_ serious?” Lucy nearly screams it. It should echo, but it’s just swallowed up by the room.

Cahill swallows. “I am...sorry, about your husband. And your daughter. Believe me, if there were some way for this not to have been necessary, we would have taken it, but there was no alternative.”

“How can there be no alternative to _murdering a sleeping child?_ ” Lucy snarls. “She was five years old! She hadn’t _done_ anything, she couldn’t threaten _anyone_!”

“We didn’t know what she might have overheard!” Cahill runs a hand over his face, drew in a deep breath. “Lucy...your mother may not have told you this, but...I belong - we both belonged - to an organisation called Rittenhouse. It was Rittenhouse that arranged for your conception. Carol...she didn’t want you to have any part in it. She was told young and...the burden of knowledge might well have been too much for her. But still, you are a part of it, whether you know it or not. It’s in the blood. You can no more help being Rittenhouse than you can change the colour of your eyes. A pure bloodline, going back to the very foundation of this country.”

“Of-” Lucy thinks for one wild moment that he means Croatia, but- The wound in her side is throbbing dully, but wrapped and not as painful as it should be. “I’m in America.”

“You are. Took a lot of work to get you back here, but it’s all being taken care of.”

A sort of surreal, incredulous horror washes over Lucy.

“What do you mean?” she asks, her voice harsh. “Taken care of how?”

Cahill smiled, almost apologetically. “Well, I’ll give you the simplified version. Your husband...found some things. Information on a project of ours. We didn’t know how much he’d told anyone, and we obviously couldn’t just let that go, so…” he gave a slightly tired sigh. “Unfortunately, he seems to have slipped through our fingers. We’ve rescued the situation as best we could - you might’ve seen it on the news if you were still in Croatia, private military contractor Garcia Flynn, now wanted for the murders of his wife and daughter-”

“No.” It’s almost a gasp, and for a moment Lucy is almost glad she’s sitting, because her legs would not support her now. Garcia is _alive_. Garcia is alive, and hunted, and the whole world believes that he- He’s a resourceful man, but how long can he hide, with his superiors and the civilian authorities both after him? Cahill tries to lay a hand between her shoulder-blades, but she shrugs him off. “You son of a bitch!” she spits. “You-”

“It’s alright,” Cahill is saying now, almost soothingly. “It’s alright. I know you’re angry now, you don’t understand what we’re trying to do here. But you will. You’ll see. Rittenhouse _needs_ you-”

“You think I’m going to- what, work for you, after what you’ve done?” Lucy demands, her voice high and oddly shrill even to her own ears. “You really think I’m just going to _-_ ”

“Yes, Lucy, you will,” Cahill says, impossibly gentle. “Because you won’t remember.”

Two heavy-set young men in dark fatigues haul her down a plush cream-painted corridor, her screams and shouts and curses echoing down the hall. Lucy fights - of course she does, she cannot do anything else - but she’s still one small, slim civilian woman and these are trained and tested soldiers. It takes both of them to force her down onto the dentist’s chair and cuff her into place, even so, and Lucy does not stop screaming until the device comes down over her face, cutting off her screams forever.

*

There is no blood on the fur of the unicorn. There are no bullet-pocks in the walls. Iris is tucked warmly against Lucy’s side with her stuffed rabbit in her arms, her hair clean and still damp from the bath, protesting sleepily that she isn’t tired at all, not in the least. The gun in Garcia’s hand is plastic, and fires nothing but water, though the habit of trigger discipline remains. Beatrix, the rabbit is called, a fluffy little bunny with half her fur already loved off and toothmarks in her ear. She’d been a christening present from- From- Already, the memory is gone.

“Well then, I’ll protect you, ok?” Garcia is saying, booping Iris on the nose with the pad of his thumb, “I’ll always protect you.”

But, of course, he hadn’t. Neither of them could.

Midnight Mass and a rare snowfall, and Iris is five. She races ahead of them, giddily excited to be staying up this late, and Lucy watches her go with an ache in her chest that she no longer remembers the name of. Tomorrow there will be presents under the tree and Bing Crosby, and Garcia will mock-beg her not to help with the Christmas dinner because they both remember the Great Turkey Massacre of Thanksgiving 2010. The cold is nipping at her ears, her nose, her cheeks, her hat pulled down low and her scarf pulled up high. She barely hears Garcia’s voice, strange, incongruous-

“Lucy.” She loves the way he says her name, low and drawn out, as if her name is a chocolate he wants to savour while he eats it. “Lucy. Listen to me. You’re stronger than this.”

Her head snaps around. “What?”

Garcia is looking at her, far more intently than she remembers, though the memory is fading fast. “You can fight this,” he says, low and intense. “I know you can. You’ve been fighting them from the moment you left.”

“You’re not real,” Lucy chokes out, breathless. “You’re not- You’re a subconscious-”

“I know I am, that doesn’t matter!” And that is the most perfectly, nonsensically _Garcia_ argument she could have imagined for him. “Look. I know you better than anyone - if I’m your subconscious, I kind of have to. I know you want to fight them. And you can, Lucy. You can do more than that, you only have to-”

Warm in the dark of their bed, Garcia’s hands and mouth on her, the slow drag of his tongue, the heat of him under her fingers, the softness of his hair-

He drops in on her at lunchtime at the office, bringing the notes she forgot at home.

“What do I need to do?” she asks, desperately. It isn’t what she asked in the original version of the memory, and his face smooths out in confusion, an actor not given his cue. She laughed at him, she remembers, teased him about- She no longer remembers what she teased him about. There must be a way to resist this, a way to fight, but she is swept along like flotsam, like a drowning swimmer swept away by the tide.

Iris’ first day at the nursery school, the way she’d clung to them - Lucy had scheduled her morning free, begged Professor Kovačević to cover her lectures, Garcia was free to take whatever mornings off he liked, so long as the work got done - and Lucy clinging too, this time. Strokes her hair and makes soothing noises. Iris is still clinging to her stuffed rabbit, but Lucy can no longer remember its name.

The christening, and Amy is there with Iris in her arms, beaming down at her.

“-going to get so many cool aunt points, just you wait.”

This time, Lucy remembers her line. “It’s not a competition, Amy!”

“That is the sort of weak-ass attitude most commonly seen in uncool aunts. Or moms, as the case may be - where _is_ the Croatian Redwood, anyway?”

“Mom’s got him buttonholed - maybe they’re patching things up?”

Lucy knows they weren’t, that the row at the christening was worse even than the one they’d had when Lucy told her she planned to change her name - not because it was expected or because she didn’t appreciate all Carol had done for her, but so that, for the first time, she could publish an article and not have every peer-review, every response, mention her mom in the first or second line. Lucy Preston was always adjunct to her mother. Lucy Flynn is an independent academic. Already, Lucy cannot remember Iris’ face at six, five, four. Already, she struggles to remember - was it ballet or judo that they’d sent her to on Saturdays, and why does the image of a red stain on white fur fill her with a sick, lurching feeling, as if she were standing on the edge of some tall tower, deciding whether or not to leap?

They’re in bed together again, and oh, she is so ready for the baby to be born, feels like she’ll split at the seams if she gets any bigger - what do they name the baby? Alice? Josephine? Grace? Maria? Garcia laughs softly in the dark at a joke about having three in the bed, not two, and Lucy-

Lucy is waiting by the phone, sick to her stomach, a pile of papers that need grading in front of her, unable to read a word of them. She remembers. Garcia is away, she is six months along, he is in the Ukraine on a contract she can’t know the full details of. He hadn’t wanted to leave, but work was work, and she’d promised she’d be fine in his absence.  
“I wished on the moon…” she half-sings to herself, because it is all she can do. It’s the song her mom used to sing when she was small, and she’ll sing it to her little girl - it is a girl, they know, they’ve had the ultrasound - when the time comes. “...a sweeter rose, a softer sky…”

It isn’t much of a hope, but- She tries to remember this, tries to bind it in with the song, the wild joy on Garcia’s face when she told him, Amy’s excited shriek at the other end of a phone line, the slight softening of Carol Preston’s icy disapproval - she’d wanted Lucy at Stanford, wanted to hand the department over to her like a crown - and the feeling of the baby moving inside her. She tries to intertwine all of that with the song in her mind, so that she cannot think of one without the other. Even if they take the memory of her baby away, they can’t keep the song from her.

The memories come thick and fast after that. Lazy summer mornings with Garcia draped warm and heavy against her back, those rare days when neither of them had anywhere to go or anyone to see. Rolling, drunken summer nights, the first giddy flush of honeymoon and the Italian night alive with the sound of cicadas. Arguments about everything and nothing, Garcia making dinner and scowling at the sauce as if it had just insulted his mother, mornings when they were both in too much of a rush to do more than get together and get out of the door without so much as a kiss or a quick ‘good morning’.

Vows before a priest in the parish where Lucy had grown up, walking up the aisle alone, since Henry Wallace is more than ten years dead and her mom could barely be talked into attending the ceremony. Stiv, looking faintly uncomfortable in his good suit, making a toast at the reception afterwards, and Amy buttonholing him to talk conspiracy theories as soon as dinner was over. Dancing and good food and music, and the wonder on Garcia’s face at the sight of her in the church.

The phone call to her mom, the row, the insults. Carol Preston hated Garcia, always had. Amy put it down to two domineering personalities that couldn’t help but come into conflict. Garcia always claimed it was because the very fact that Lucy had defied her mother to marry him had been proof Carol couldn’t control her any longer. Lucy wondered if it wasn’t just that  he was one more thing to keep her in Europe, away from Stanford and the life Carol had wanted for her.

Garcia kneeling at her feet with a ring in his hands, and she says ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ and ‘yes’ again, laughing, giddy, delighted with him and with herself and with the world entire-

Learning to live together, each little discovery slipping away as she makes it- The day she noticed that he never needed to ask how she wanted her coffee anymore- His way of pacing the apartment at night when he couldn't sleep- A ridiculous argument about her habit of leaving pens and post-its and half-drunk cups of coffee on every flat surface-

Letters from Somalia, from Darfur, and brief dates whenever he’s in Paris, reading every letter as if it might be the last-

Meeting again, outside the Sorbonne, and Lucy’s just started her PhD, but she recognises her rescuer on sight and nearly chases him down to buy him a cup of coffee and finally get to say ‘thank you’-

And now, at last, she’s come to the end of them, standing there on the rocks at the edge of the river, looking up at a sharp-nosed, dark-haired stranger. At the time, she remembers, he seemed impossibly old and cool and intimidating. Now- God, he isn’t even thirty yet. Not far off it, but not there yet.

“Easy,” he says, steadying her footing, and the memory of his voice, the guttural edge of his accent, the warmth of his hands, slips out of Lucy’s head as if it were never there. “Are you-”

She didn’t kiss him, when this happened, when this really happened, not this hollow dream-echo of it. He did not make a sweet, startled noise in his throat and pull her close, his mouth fierce on hers and his arms warm about her as if they could melt into one being if he only held her tight enough.

She kisses him as if he were air and she a drowning woman, fists her hands in the lapels of his coat and clings on as if she might be able to keep him with her by force of will alone.

“I won’t forget,” she gasps out between kisses. “I won’t forget, I won’t forget, I won’t-”

But he is already melting away beneath her hands, as insubstantial as a ghost, and Lucy-

*

Lucy doesn’t quite realise where she is, at first. The ceiling seems...wrong, somehow. Unfamiliar. The bed is too narrow, she can’t stretch out. She blinks groggily up at the ceiling, and then...oh. Oh, of course. The flight from Dubrovnik is a merciful blank in her memory - she must’ve slept the whole way here - but with how much worse Mom had gotten, it wasn’t fair to expect Amy to do it all alone now. A visiting professorship at Stanford seemed like a decent foothold, and- and now, of all times, was her great act of rebellion in moving halfway across the world to teach American history in Eastern Europe really such a great idea as it had seemed?

Amy’s in the kitchen when she gets there, making pancakes.

“Hey!” she calls over her shoulder, attempting to flip a pancake theatrically and nearly spilling it all over the floor. “Sit down. I got this.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“The occasion is, you’re back from - where is it, Yugoslavia or somewhere?”

“Croatia,” Lucy corrects automatically. “Used to be part of Yugoslavia, isn’t anymore, and whatever you do, don’t call it that around-”

She stops, blinking. Around who? It’s not like Amy ever plans on visiting, and Lucy’s staying stateside from now on, so why does it matter?

“Yeah, there,” Amy agrees, “You’re back, and I’m making welcome-home pancakes.”

Lucy snorts, “I’m not planning on going back, you know,” she says. A strange sort of pang goes through her as she says it, but her independence and the prospect of tenure back in Dubrovnik can’t mean that much, not in the face of all this. Maybe it’s just Mom’s condition. It’s...she’d known, intellectually, but now it seems to hit her, all at once, just how bad things are. Mom’s in a coma, might be dying, and Lucy- She’ll die disappointed in Lucy, if she never wakes up. All those years of work, the legacy she’d built up, and Lucy had swanned off to first the Sorbonne and then Dubrovnik without a care in the world. Pain flooded through her. How much had it hurt her mother, to know that Lucy had turned her back on everything Carol had worked for? And now- Will there ever be a chance to make this right?

“Thinking of removing the ‘visiting’ from ‘visiting professor’?” Amy asks, with a sly look over her shoulder.

“If I can manage it,” Lucy says, helping herself to orange juice so she doesn’t have to look Amy in the face. “That department is Mom’s legacy, I can’t just…”

Amy frowns at her. “If you cared about all the ‘legacy’ shit, you wouldn’t have gone overseas for the PhD.”

“I know, I just…” Lucy rubs her eyes. “I...it’s been rough. I can’t stop feeling like I- Like I’ve let everyone down.”

Amy pauses for a long moment, then nods. “Well,” she says, with forced cheerfulness. “If you’re sure you want it...good luck. The history guys  at Stanford have got to be mad not to want you to stick around.”

Lucy forces a smile, “Thanks, Amy.”

She’s probably just jetlagged, she tells herself. Jetlag and Mom’s in a coma and having to start all over again when, this time last month, she’d been up for tenure and would now have to go through the whole thing again at a whole new institution. Well, Stanford, anyway. Her alma mater, which should make this whole transition easier. Anyone would want to lie down and just cry for a bit under those circumstances, but it’s not going to get anything done.

She’s on edge all day, jittery, and when she knocks a wine-glass that evening and there’s a pool of spilt red all over the fluffy white rug in the living-room, she can’t explain even to Amy what it is that makes her cry.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> By popular request, a sequel set at the end of S1. Less overtly shippy, but they've got a lot of relationship development to get through, and Lucy wants to remember.  
> Season 1 is going to have to have been different in a number of small ways, none of which really merit a fic of their own except just how differently Lucy's kidnap (if it even happens here) is going to play out. The main thrust of this is - Flynn is a lot less willing to hurt his wife than he is to hurt someone who is, journal aside, mostly a stranger and usually an antagonist. As such, a fair bit of his behaviour does shift, but writing out every incident would be a) time-consuming and b) repetitive.

Lucy was waiting at the top of the steps, wrapped up in a new tan coat that Garcia didn’t recognise. Well, of course he didn’t. Two years, it had been now. Two years since he’d felt her get up in the night, heard gunshots from the landing, found Iris dead on the floor of her bedroom and seen a body he’d thought was Lucy’s cooling by the door. It had been dark, the bullets had been flying, he’d barely got out of the house alive, and so it had been two weeks before his dead wife walked into a bar in Sao Paulo, sat down beside him and gave him a book. She had recognised him then, or seemed to. She did not recognise him now.

A full year of chasing each other through history, and every time, every time, Garcia had not been able to stop himself from hoping that she’d turn, and she’d see him, really see him, the way she had before. It had taken the Alamo to make him realise just how little he’d be able to bear it, now, just how much it would hurt to see anger and disgust on her face and know that she knew everything they had been to each other and everything they could never be again. Well, that was over with now. Time to have this done.

“You alone?”

“I said I would be.” She turned to face him, fearless as ever. This would be his last sight of her, he knew. One last trip, and then...then, he would hand himself over, fake a death for himself and then submit to a lifetime in whatever blacksite it was the Americans would find to throw him in. Maybe he wouldn’t even need to fake a death for long - he’d killed enough men, caused enough damage that someone might well argue a quiet, off-the-books execution was all that he merited. He’d known what the consequences would be when he’d started all this, and he couldn’t balk at them now.

“Do you have it?” he asked.

Lucy nodded and fished in a coat pocket, withdrawing a slim black flashdrive, but she didn’t hand it to him.

“There’s something I need to know first,” she said, and for the first time she sounded almost nervous.

“What?”

“Why didn’t you tell me I was the woman you were planning to leave?”

Garcia froze.

“...how do you know that?” he demanded, his voice low and rasping even to his own ears.

Lucy looked back at him, jaw set, expression hard. “Connor Mason did a bit of digging. Into Rittenhouse, what they were up to. Turned out my file had been doctored. Mason wanted to know why, so he dug a bit further…” Lucy drew in a breath. “It...explained a lot, actually. Little things that have been bothering me for a while. Like why I knew I owned a house in Dubrovnik big enough for three or four people when, so far as I remembered, I’d been living on my own all that time. Or why I don’t remember learning Croatian, even though I know I can still speak it.”

He’d taught her, Garcia remembered, with a little stab of pain. He’d started by teaching her how to swear in it, since she’d wanted to know exactly what his barracks-room language meant whenever anything went wrong. From there, they’d moved on to the technical language of their respective professions, and he’d ended up teaching her the ordinary tourist’s phrases last of all, when she’d come to Dubrovnik at last to teach and found she didn’t know how to buy bread or ask directions.

“So,” Lucy said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Would you have believed me if I did?” Garcia retorted. “A wanted fugitive turning up in one of your lectures and claiming to be your husband? Or the terrorist you were chasing declaring undying love out of the blue? What could I have said that would have convinced you of anything other than that I was every bit as mad as you’d been told?”

“I don’t know!” Lucy threw up her hands in her old familiar gesture of exasperation, as if they were home again and she was being driven mad by university paperwork or her mother’s latest demand that she give up the promise of tenure in Dubrovnik to go and continue the Preston legacy at Stanford, in the shadow of Carol’s own long career. “I don’t know what should’ve happened, except that- that I’ve just found out I’m married, to _you_ and that I had a daughter, and she’s-” she laughed. “I don’t know how much effort they put into this - why engineer a cover-up this big when they can _literally_ rewrite reality?”

“I don’t know.” Garcia admitted. “I thought you’d died with Iris, or I’d never have run. I didn’t know what they’d really done to you until…”

“Until?”

“Until you walked right up to me and told me yourself.” Garcia produced the journal from his pocket, the last thing he had left of her. “I almost thought you were a ghost at first, but you were...quite real.”

She’d been older. New scars, new lines around the eyes, tics and habits that the Lucy he had known had never had any reason to develop. But he would have known her anywhere. Blind, he would know her by the sound of her breathing. Deaf, he would recognise the scent of her skin. She’d told him they could save Iris, and he had wanted, more than anything, to believe her.

Lucy stared. “But how would I- I mean, I know what I was doing all that year. Unless I got away and they had to wipe me again, but-”

“I don’t know. You were older than you are now, about five years older, I’d guess, though it could have been more. Take it from me,” he added, a ridiculous fond smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You age surprisingly well.”

Lucy was still for a moment, then nodded jerkily. “All right, leaving aside how impossible that is for a moment...has your plan remained the same?”

Garcia blinked. “Clearly not, since you stopped me blowing up the Rittenhouse convention-”

“Not that plan.” Lucy breathed in deep. “You said you intended to come back once, say goodbye, and then disappear.”

“...something like that,” Garcia admitted. In truth, the moment he had said it, he had known he could never say goodbye. He would see them, once, from a distance, and that would be all. They would hear of his death, perhaps they would grieve, not knowing what he had done, and then they would move on. “I said before - would you really want me back, knowing all I’ve done?”

“Would I know?” Lucy demanded. “If you’d changed history, brought Iris back, made it so none of this-” she waved a hand vaguely between them, “Had ever happened?”

“I won’t keep up a marriage under false pretences,” Garcia said shortly, his heart sinking. Just how low an opinion did she have of him, that she believed him capable of it? “Neither of us is the same person we were before this started. We can’t pretend to be, and I don’t think you even want to. Not really.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to pretend. And- And I’ve tried ‘let’s just pick up where we left off’ before, and...we can’t go back to where we were.”

He had known it was coming. Somehow, he had thought that would make it hurt less, but the words cut at him all the same.

Lucy took a deep breath. “But- I want to remember. I want to be able to make the choice for myself about...everything, really. And I- I need to know about her. Iris.” She straightened up a little. “One last trip. We can time them so I’m rescuing Amy while you undo the attack in Dubrovnik. So we both remember everything. And then…” she shrugged. “Well, your record should be clear, since if Iris lives you’ll have had no reason to steal the Mothership in the first place, but I still won’t remember. We can work something out. I’m not saying I’m about to leap into your arms and declare that all is forgiven, but…” she shrugged. “I’ll be coming back to a daughter I don’t remember ever meeting. I can’t do that alone. And I can’t just stay here and let myself - this version of myself - get erased, either.”

It was- It was, god, not enough, not anything like enough- But it was more than he had ever let himself hope for.

“Might be trouble timing that exactly,” he offered, “We could go together. Mothership’s got to be faster and more reliable than your Lifeboat.”

Lucy laughed, and it was an odd, sharp pain to hear that that had not changed either. “Well, when you put it like-”

“On your knees!” a voice shouts from somewhere behind him, and- He’d been stupid, he’d been distracted, he’d seen Lucy and he hadn’t _thought-_

“Let me see your hands!”

There’s - it must be her, the Homeland Security agent running Lucy’s team- What’s her name? Christopher. She’s there, and Lucy is wheeling, mouth open- She didn’t expect this, he knows, she wouldn’t have suggested they go together if she had. Except- Does he know her, this version of her, with him and Iris and the life they’d made together carved out?

He doesn’t, she’s made that abundantly clear, and maybe he shouldn’t feel betrayed, but-

Lucy is snarling something at Christopher now, but he can barely hear it over the roaring in his ears, can barely hear his own voice, harsh and ragged, as hard hands close around his arms and he is dragged away.

The last thing he sees is Lucy’s face, eyes blazing, near incandescent with rage, and he wishes, more than anything, that he could believe the hope that expression offers.

 


End file.
